Periodically I get struck by random thoughts. Sometimes jokes, sometimes theories of quantum gravity, other times it's just some whim to do something amusing and hazardous to large numbers of people, sometimes prompting visits by the Department of Homeland Security. This time it's the latter of these.

I can't remember exactly which morning it was, that I woke up and thought 'I should release MPQDraft as open-source software'. Obviously 'why' would be an inappropriate question in response to such a whim, so I went to work on the code. There are several thousand lines of code in it, and polishing up and documenting the code ended up being more work than I was expecting (not to mention that I've been playing WoW a lot lately, as well as school and work, none of which help in this particular case), and is very much ongoing. The permanent source code server is currently being set up, and the code will be uploaded as I finish polishing and commenting it.

Unless I change my mind in the very near future, the license I'll be releasing it under (save for things I don't own, like the Blizzard icons) will be the Common Development and Distribution License by Sun. A brief summary of the key features of the license is that you may use the code or methods in any way you want, and in any other program, free or commercial, with two conditions. First, any alterations, improvements, or additions to the borrowed code itself must be released under the CDDL. Second, you have to credit the original project (MPQDraft, in this case). Of course, the other feature of the open source model is that anyone may submit improvements back to the original project itself.

I think that's about all I can think of for tonight. Maybe I'll remember more to say in the morning.